Heartsick.

I can feel myself aching today.

Aching for sounds of fluid R's and round A's in a foreign tongue.

For the feel of tiny hands curled around my fingers.

For burning uphill/upstairs walks in heavy heat.

For the ability to read someone's eyes and know exactly what he's saying because he can't speak at all.

For that satisfaction that my life is not my own.

For that wonderful, painful heartsickness that happens when you're loved by a child.

I haven't been able to get Romania and the summer of 2009 out of my head for the past few weeks. I can't stop wishing that I were there still. Too much downtime.
I have posted a video I made of my experience to my old blog--www.woodswordsandwildthings.blogspot.com

I had to make it private for confidentiality reasons regarding the orphanage and the hospital I worked at. A few of you are already familiar with this blog. If you feel that you should be, but are not, let me know and I'll send you an invite to it.

For the rest of you, here's an excerpt from the land my head's lived in for the past little while:

Post from 6.17.2009

I am growing more and more attached to those munchkins at the Dancu apartments. I'm starting to wonder if I will be able to make it away from them. I feel like I talk more about the funny/terrible days on this blog than the good days, so I am not going to share anything about today.

Yesterday, however, they were all little angels. Really. In fact, so much so that I found myself ver

y much surprised. Ellie Young, of the BYU Special Education department, who specializes in behavioral analysis and correction, is visiting this week and accompanied us to Dancu yesterday afternoon. I'm not sure if her presence had anything to do with it, but they we better than they have ever been before while she was there and I found myself a little disappointed because I had wanted her advice regarding the difficult times, rather than the easier times. At the same time, however, I couldn't help but be delighted because it felt like we were really making progress with the kids! Some things that happened:

-B---, who only says so many words, said mulțumesc several times and sang the song back to me that I have been singing to him for the past two weeks.

-At the park M-----a started pushing C------ in her swing! And we didn't even facilitate it!

-C------ was being very independent, which is un

usual for her. While typically she takes a lot of encouragement to try new things and do things on her own, yesterday she finally learned to swing by herself and even took to Ellie very well, instead of being her normal, shy, C------ self. And she walked part of the way home by herself, without holding anyone's hand. Normally the workers don't like them to walk without holding someone's hand because they can run off if we do this, but C------ is usually too scared to anyways. So she is proving to be a lot more self-assured lately.

-M----n had the cutest bedhead when he woke up. And when we went to the park, instead of sitting quietly and watching all the other children, as he often does, he kept swinging and then yelling my name across the park for me to look at him.

-Once, while we were at the park, M-----a climbed up the biggest slide and yelled for the worker, D---, to look at her: "D--- uite!" And with a cursory glance, all D--- said was "stai cuminte", or 'stay good' and then went back to sitting in glowering silence with B--- on the swing. And M-----a literally slumped and slid her way down. This made me realize how important encouragement is--that most of the progress we've made with M-----a so far is probably due to the attention we've given to her for the positive things that she does. No wonder she does so

many naughty things--it's the only way she ever gets the attention of the people whose approval she craves most. Sometimes I wonder how things will be in the fall once we've gone and things go back to the way they once were.

------

Children come and go here like the rain. Just as I begin to really enjoy the cleansing, cooling wetness the heavens dry up and I am left steaming as I trudge through mud and puddles. And as I walk up the six flights of stairs I am greeted by the old woman who lives beneath us with "mai plouă?" So I whisper back, "Nu. A terminat."

Andrei left the hospital today.

It had been a while since I had seen him and I was surprised at how much weight he had gained--his face put on a winter coat for the summer. As we walked by his room in search of the other girls his scratchy little voice accosted us to give him a toy phone he dropped for our benefit. We went to him, his excitement in seeing us reward enough, and he begged to be taken outside, despite the rain. And then the nurses came and told us that his foster mother was supposed to come in ten minutes to take him home with her. For good. So I

stayed with him while Keilani sought out Alyssa, who had grown closer to him than any of us. She and Breanne came, looking very put out at the news. And the four of us spent a glorious hour with him, waiting for the dreaded 'mother'. And remembering him in the beginning--badly burned, tied to the bed, weakly moaning "Mi-e foame" over and over again. And admiring this cocă while talking to a woman about the Church, which is difficult in Romanian. Then, just when time had planted a seed of hope within me that, perhaps it would not be today, she came: a small, skinny woman, with more bangs than anything and more nose than bangs. This arrested our fun, mid giggle. The nurses

explained who she was to Andrei, who resisted until she promised that she would take him outside, and then he warmed up to her. We watched as the disheartening procession down the hall and back in to his room, fighting back tears and feeling silly for being so selfish, yet still wishing he wouldn't go. They came back out of his room and he was all decked out in newer, smarter clothes--in shoes that actually fit his chubby picoare and a knitted hat that would have been appropriate, except that they rain had stopped now and the sun shining as though it had never been. A crowd of interns and patients stood and watched them emerge. He turned, saw us, waved proudly, and then, at 'mother's' behest, he ran towards us into Alyssa's outstretched arms.

And then he marched stoutly away from us, hand-in-hand with a woman who seemed smaller than he was, who would not know how much he like dogs or that he does not really know how to eat bananas or he doesn't really like to be teased or that he goes rotten if you spoil him too much and starts spitting, or that he has the biggest, belliest laugh in the world.

And after that we didn't feel much like doing more, so we gave the woman a pass along card and headed for home. It was hot again and I felt that nothing seems very predictable here.

Today: a kick in the shins. or four.

I am a substitute teacher.
I really like being a substitute teacher.
However.
On occasion, it is rough:

If only this picture did the state of my poor shins justice.

Today I worked at Meridian High School. I've spent approximately 3 of the last 7 weeks working there, because we seem to find one another so agreeable. I work as a signing assistant for a 17 year-old boy, who just so happens to be both deaf and autistic. And very large.

Bekah and I have affectionately named him Fezzik, because he seems to come up in so often in conversation.

We laugh about it, but you have no idea how closely this picture resembles the guy. So perhaps he's not quite so tall, but with a slick haircut and a thin pubescent chinstrap, this picture would be fairly accurate.
Because he has difficulty communicating, Fezzik tends to bang his fist against things to express himself: lockers, tables, doors, windows, himself, me, etc. It doesn't necessarily mean he's upset--often it means he's excited or bored or really just needs someone's attention. When he's upset he's a medley of aggravated bangs, kicks, spits, and dirty looks. These are things we like to discourage. In fact, the hired Behavior Interventionist and I have begun making him sit on the floor when he does this, which has worked out pretty well. It is very peculiar--often, when he is upset, he'll cause an uproar with his banging and then sit down on the floor immediately when you tell him to. Like he knows he deserves the punishment.

Today he wouldn't stop banging. I told him to sit on the floor. He didn't like that idea much. He furrowed his brows at me, folded his arms, harrumphed and spit.
And kicked me in the shins. Repeatedly. You may be pleased to know that I held my ground. I didn't give in. I told him (signed to him, really) that he knew it was coming and that's what he had to do. And he sat and pouted and pouted and sat. I placed a makeshift screen by him to rid him of other distractions. Then I picked up a random book. Read a little bit (and realized it was a book I'd read once in middle school), played with some other kids in the class, helped one with an art project. Occasionally I saw him looking over his shoulder at me, even though he'd made a big show of turning his back to me when he knew I was looking. There were a few reprisal bangs on the counter throughout it all.

Finally, I turned around at the teacher's beckoning to find him sitting there, on the floor, the bitter taste of defeat grimacing at his mouth. And the rest of our time together went beautifully.



Moral of the story: never wear a skirt without some sort of boot to work again.



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Writer's Bloq.

I’ve tried so many times to write this essay. I feel that it’s there in me, somewhere, but discovering this elusive nook of eloquent secrets is much more difficult that I anticipated. I haven’t quite pinpointed what it looks like, which makes it difficult to search for. But really, I mean, come on—it’s about me, isn’t it? Shouldn’t I be the ultimate authority on myself, the best one to put my own thoughts into words?

Sometimes I think that the most difficult thing about personal writing is that I’ve read too much of others’ ideas. My mind has created a composite of everything I’ve ever known as a typeface for how my own story should look; because it has to have closure and it has to have an ‘aha!’ moment of startling realization and the characters must be developed and whoever writes it must have a complete and thorough understanding of her story and all the morals behind it, which she then applies in her own life and—presto!—she is the perfect person.

But my story is not perfect and God knows I’m not either. It feels impossible to pare down characters that I really know into short story figures and my ‘aha!’ didn’t knock the wind out of me with the kind of abruptness that seems appropriate for normal climaxes. I’m not sure how the story ends or even exactly where it begins. The only thing I’m sure of is that what I think it should be and what it is don’t seem to align so well.

I wonder.

I wonder how I would go about writing it if I had never read another’s story.

I guess I would just start typing.

Warning: Spoiler.

Lately I've found myself engrossed in Hemmingway's The Sun Also Rises. When I say engrossed, I really mean that I've been grabbing it off the back-room shelf to entertain during slow days at work in the writing center. As my first serious encounter with Hemmingway, I found myself pleased with the accessibility and authenticity of his characters thus far.

However.

Last week, as I sat at the elitist "tutor table"--designed especially for us haut monde who know the difference between affect and effect--a co-worker (whose name will go unmentioned in order to protect him from possible slander and/or hate crimes) set out to be the cause of my undoing:

Noticing the book laying next to me on the table, "Oh, you're reading Hemmingway?" he coyly lured me into seemingly innocent conversation. "Have you read much by him?"

"No, this is actually my first." I was naive and unsuspecting.

"This is actually the only one I haven't read by him. Isn't it the one about Brett Ashley? She's the girl, right?"

"Yeah, she's the girl." I was impressed that he knew the character's full name. He must really like Hemmingway.

"And the guy she's in love with, his name is Jacob, isn't it?

Spot on. I could feel a little vortex of excitement welling within as I realized we really were on the same page; I always get this way when discussing books.

"And they can't be together because he lost his reproductive organ in war?"

The vortex seized and collapsed in upon itself, and me.

Crushed:

"I...haven't gotten to that part, yet." And all the intrigue of the book that kept me reading seemed to reveal itself in the undeniable truth of his words.

Blast.

However, not all is lost. Now I find myself reading in hopes of eventually getting to the scene in which that ever-critical bit of information is revealed. Hemmingway has managed to do it all well enough that merely knowing what happens is insufficient--I must see how.

***

Also: As a byproduct of reading, I have discovered that the word toro literally means "bull" in Spanish. How disappointing. As a friend of mine cleverly pointed out, the bullfighter's call "Toro! Toro!" is not unlike America's own disparaging "Hey batter batter!"